At present, increasing numbers of medical treatments involve medical devices used at home by a patient. These include, for example, oxygen concentrators, tanks, portable containers or bottles for respiratory conditions, continuous positive airway pressure apparatuses for the treatment of sleep apnea, bilevel pressure ventilators for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or COPD), feeding pumps, nebulizers, mucus suction apparatuses or syringe pumps and any other medical device. Such medical devices, when they are operating, create vibrations, for example of a housing, a chassis or an internal member.
The advantage of such medical devices is to enable the patient to receive the medical treatment at home or wherever he or she may be. The patient does not need to go to see a doctor or go to the hospital, thereby also enabling the cost of the medical treatment to be reduced. There is the question, however, of how to monitor compliance by the patient with the medical treatment, for medical or legal reasons.
To solve this problem, it is known to monitor the activation of the medical device. To this end, the medical device is, for example, equipped with a monitoring device for recording the time periods during which the medical device is on. The results are advantageously collected at regular time intervals, for example by a person responsible for maintenance of the device, or a caregiver, or in general directly on the medical device by simple reading.
However, such monitoring simply detects that the medical device is turned on, and not whether it is actually used by the patient in order to receive the medical treatment. The results collected may be misleading if the patient forgets to turn the medical device off after use, or turns the medical device on without performing the medical treatment.